The market does determine the price of software. Really ? You honestly think people want to pay $300 for the flakiest piece of software on their system ? The piece of software that's shoved down their throats with every new computer purchase ?
Last time I checked, free markets operated on supply and demand. There is infinite supply for software, because it is a virtual asset - it can be copied until there are no spare bits left in the known universe. That should push the value down somewhat.
There is limited demand for software, because you really only need one copy per machine. There is no consumption behavior with software, you don't buy more of it when you like a certain product. If that box of Vista made you happy, you're not going to rush to Walmart and buy four more to eat later.
The last thing is relative value. A new computer today can be had for a couple hundred bucks. In many cases, Windows costs more than the machine it runs on. That's not right! Without that hardware, Windows would be nothing! But the reverse is not true - you could buy a computer without Windows and enjoy it quite well using a free operating system.
Windows should be cheap... no more than a blockbuster video game - let's say $50-60 retail, $20 OEM. Seriously! If I could sell Windows to my customers for $20 with their new computers, I can tell you I'd sell a whole more of it! The way things are today, I'd guess at least 2/3rds of those who buy computers from me are loading an unlicensed copy of Windows on there - actually a bunch of them probably dual-boot XP and Vista.
The artificially high price directly encourages software piracy. Meanwhile these despicable "retail pirates", these dickless sons of bitches who sell burned copies on the street, are profiting because of that price gap. Eliminate the price gap, and it will eliminate the piracy problem. It won't stop private copying, nothing ever will, but it will squeeze the commercial pirates out of business.
Just because employers make irrational demands, does not mean you're forced to oblige them. If a company gives you flak for submitting a CV in non-MS format, my spidey-sense tells me you wouldn't enjoy working there anyway. Plain text works, PDF is relatively safe too.
Me, I have zero tolerance for obnoxiously stupid individuals. Obviously I'm alone, because there are a lot of good people wasting away making very stupid bosses very rich. Thank god for that employee assistance hotline, eh ? What good is a job if it destroys your will to live ?
Because it's been 13 years since Microsoft developed anything of moderate value.
Windows XP is just 95 with a retooled engine, but to most people's eyeballs it's the same damned thing with more gradients on the UI chrome.
Vista adds ZERO value, it removes value by crippling the system with far-reaching DRM and disappointing performance. Even its revamped security model is full of holes and users are just as likely to get confused (or annoyed).
If Vista offered anything the users really wanted, we would have stood in line at 12:01 A.M. to buy it. Remember MS-Dos 6.0 ? People stood in line for that one, we all wanted to get our hands on Memmaker, Doublespace and a handful of refinements that actually made our computers work better and play harder. It was worth the money.
Remember Windows 95 ? People stood in line for that one too. It was a leap forward from Windows 3.11 (which stank). W95 was a mess, buggy and temperamental, but it was fresh and offered new opportunities for multitasking and, at long last, long file names. It, too, was worth the money.
Windows XP ? It was just a cheap consumer version of Windows 2000, minus the stability. Not until SP1 was it any usable for more than a day or two, but today it's pretty solid, after SEVEN YEARS of patches. Not really worth the money.
The main reason people upgraded from 95/98/ME to XP was for hardware support. The OS itself didn't offer much in the way of new features, which is why a lot of older computers still run Windows ME or 2000, because that's what they came with and there's no real value in upgrading.
Now with Vista, there's even less of an incentive to upgrade because the new OS has worse hardware support for _current_ equipment than the old OS it supposedly replaced. Vista (32-bit) still doesn't support more than 4gb of Ram, and 64-bit support is spotty. Why the hell anyone would want to run Vista on a non-64-bit-capable machine is beyond me, but stupid makes this world go round.
If I were dying to have blingy blurry jiggly UI chrome, I'd keep XP and load something like WindowBlinds, or whatever the gimmick-du-jour is. Cheaper, more reliable (go figure!) and I'll still be able to do the same things I do today.
the majority (yes, not all) of the terrorists in the past 20 years have been middle eastern looking males
Maybe that's because there's a whole lot more middle-eastern looking people than pasty white people in the world. Some of them cram over 150 million people in countries smaller than the average U.S. state.
If the terrorists were Chinese-looking instead, would you say that all Chinese, Japanese, Vietnamese and Koreans are terrorists ? Because the average American can't tell them apart. Would you harass all of them if they tried to board a plane ?
You worded that as a question ? That just shows me you need to stop drinking the kool aid.
Simple terrorism test:
1. Why did the U.S. military invade Iraq ? A: Revenge, and to spread "democracy". (political and ideological)
2. What did the U.S. military do in Iraq ? A: Kill a shitload of people in the name of God. (ideological)
3. Is the U.S. military (as a group) completely insane, acting upon primal anti-social urges ? A: No. They calculated and planned this.
When you kill that many people, and you're not a demented serial killer, then only two options remain: terrorist, or god. I'm pretty sure the U.S. military aren't gods, though some gun freaks may disagree.
Modern copy protection doesn't prevent the physical copy, it prevents the enjoyment of that copy. You can still make ISOs and throw them around, but they're unusable unless a cracked executable is available to bypass Securom / Safedisc etc.
We're not in the 80s anymore, you can't protect software by warping disk sectors. They tried doing that a few years back with Safedisc, by using specific chains of edge-case hard-to-encode bits on CD, which would read just fine, but confuse the hell out of cheap burners that would either correct the shady bits, or die trying. A year later, most new burners had a revised EFM encoder that fixed the bug, effectively thwarting the copy protection.
Today's copy protection is more like DRM, because you can't protect raw bits flying over the interweb.
Well yes, but there's also an important reason for the -1 mod: the GP has no factual basis for laying the blame on Israel.
In fact, I've seen far more attacks coming from Pakistan, Egypt and Yemen (?!) than Israel. But yes, people are racially biased... whether it's pro-racism or anti-racism, very few people have the discipline to be right down the middle.
I think what a lot of people neglect to do is to filter access by country. If you're operating a U.S. bank, why in the world would you want Vietnamese and Chinese IPs visiting your site or hammering your firewall ? Do you have an admin over there, SSHing in ? No ? Then block it!
It's usually quite simple to come up with a geographically aware security strategy. Figure out which areas need access to each resource, and shut out the rest. Web access isn't spared, either. If you don't offer services outside your country, I strongly suggest serving up a different, nerfed site to those people - something with no sign-up forms or dynamic content of any kind. That way, they can still read up about who you are and what you do (again, goddamned travelers surfing abroad), but since you don't do business with that nation, you don't expose your site's soft underbelly to people who have no business being there in the first place. There's always the phone or postal mail for those folks.
Vicious, he is. I'm not saying he did it, but if he did, he strikes me as the kind of ass who'd think he's smarter than everyone in the courtroom. The sad thing is in this day and age, he's probably right.
Yep, definitely a terrorist. The whole mass murderer angle is kinda sexy, but there's no way I could actually eliminate large groups of people and blame it on demonic voices inside my head. The only demonic voice to be heard is the one escaping my lips.
Perhaps the difference between me and the common terrorist, is I fully realize the fact that killing a few thousand people won't change a damned thing. How many tens of millions have died in Africa, or South America ? They're in no better shape than they were a century ago.
How many deaths can change the world ? A billion, perhaps ? I don't know of any terrorist organization that could command that sort of power without rotting from the inside out. Not even the U.S. Gov't, with their legions of suicidal troops, can trigger change on this dying planet.
Is there anyone left on this planet that does not know what Poutine is ? It's bad enough that 99.44% of everyone who isn't hardcore Quebec blood has to screw up the idiot-proof recipe.
In fact, I just had a bad poutine last night. The fries were fine, they used St-Albert cheese curds, which is perfect, but then they went and poured this ghetto freakin' chicken gravy. TABARNAK!
For those of you who aren't afraid to die young, try this: either cut your fries fresh, and cut them thick, or buy frozen fries... either Cavendish or the cheapest store brand you can find. Pile on a very generous quantity of white cheddar cheese curds, none of that shredded bullshit, and NO GODDAMNED MOZZA! Top it off with thick dark gravy for the authentic flavour, or BBQ gravy if you're curious.
It will kill you, but it might just be the best snack you'll ever know. Nothing mops up a hangover like two pounds of poutine with your bacon and eggs:) Ready to party again!
A good example of that was the "homosexual union" efforts in the city of San Francisco. The State government said "nope" and invalidated the 1800 marriage certificates issued by that fair city on the left side of the Union So you're basically countering my argument with an example of government meddling ? Congrats! Just because you share the homophobic views of the uneducated, the overly religious and the plain old arrogant, does not mean your government is just and "balanced".
In an age where basic human rights are subject to state legislation, government is anything but balanced.
They were terrorists the minute they started spreading terror.
When they boarded the plane, chances are they were just another passenger with a passport, like all the others.
The only thing ID verification does is show that you have a piece of paper with a picture on it. It could very well be someone else's piece of paper, with your picture schmoozed in. It could also be a complete fabrication, fresh off the dye-sub. It doesn't say "Terrorist!" or "Not a terrorist!", it says "This is a picture of Joe Random. If the person in front of you looks like this picture, you should refer to them as Joe Random."
It's not like Cletus the Rent-a-Cop is going to scrutinize every little detail, call three different unrelated people to check references, and actually care. Let's face it: if crazies weren't getting on planes in the first place, Cletus would be out of a job.
If I were to march into a crowded lobby tomorrow morning and spontaneously open fire on random civilians, I'd be a terrorist. Today, I have no criminal record whatsoever. Tomorrow I could be Canada's most wanted. Looking at my ID won't save anyone's life. If looking at someone's ID tells you they should be arrested, that person should have been behind bars in the first place.
Yup, I have to install cracks on my games, mostly because some genius over at Securom decided SCSI was the devil's tool. See, because I'm smart enough to realize that 15k rpm SCSI drives are faster (and cheaper!) than Raptors, I get labeled a digital terrorist and punished by this stupid copy protection bullshit. FYI, they ban SCSI because Daemon Tools emulates SCSI devices... so in response, Daemon Tools came up with IDE emulators.
The only games that don't get cracked, are the ones that nobody cares about. Even Daikatana was cracked... Copy protection is no longer a cat and mouse game, because the cat has ten thousand claws and a million eyes - you just can't escape it.
The pathetic thing about it all, is that software developers pay big bucks for this protection software that doesn't even work. Oh, I mean sure it works, for the first four hours until someone releases a crack. In most cases there's a patch available before the game is even officially released, thanks to inside leaks and pre-stocked retail outlets.
I'd much rather see the developers save their money, get rid of the copy protection and let their products thrive on their own merits. Not everyone copies games, and those that do, will not buy games. If one game is deemed "uncrackable", the warez kiddie will simply find some other game to play. You didn't make a penny more.
Fine then, if an artist wants to release just the album, let Apple collect higher fees to compensate for the hassle and reduced sales... and enforce a lower price point.
If the full album were $7.99, it wouldn't be so bad. Eight bucks won't kill you, if it's a band you actually like.
Yeah well, considering the huge number of Chinese people living in Canada, whoever's launching these attacks should back the fuck off. I can't think of very many countries that are as welcoming to Chinese immigrants as Canada, because a significant portion of the world is (justifiably) pissed off / scared of them.
Me, I like Chinese food a lot:)
But seriously, back the fuck off. I've already banned Chinese IP blocks from every single box I own, nothing but trouble. They should work on cleaning up their act - this world doesn't need another war.
What puzzles me, or should I say "baffles", is how revealing the location of the body somehow makes this man less of a psycho.
Finding the body does not automagically make Hans less of a threat. Why would his sentence be reduced ? He should be grateful the victim's family doesn't have him drawn and quartered.
Whoever transmits in interstate or foreign commerce any communication, with the intent to coerce, intimidate, harass, or cause substantial emotional distress to a person, using electronic means to support severe, repeated, and hostile behavior Sounds like a great retort to an RIAA+MPAA inquisition, with the potential for a decent counterclaim. RICO charges never amount to shit, this might be a better poking stick.
I'm not fond of laws - they never work out as intended, thanks to these pedantic illiterate asshats we call prosecutors - but if anything can help tip the scales toward the little guy, I'm all for it.
You nailed it. Anyone can be considered "scientifically relevant" if they're willing to bribe the academic clearing houses. The aristocracy of science is the complete antithesis to its actual purpose.
Slashdot Mirror
Last time I checked, free markets operated on supply and demand. There is infinite supply for software, because it is a virtual asset - it can be copied until there are no spare bits left in the known universe. That should push the value down somewhat.
There is limited demand for software, because you really only need one copy per machine. There is no consumption behavior with software, you don't buy more of it when you like a certain product. If that box of Vista made you happy, you're not going to rush to Walmart and buy four more to eat later.
The last thing is relative value. A new computer today can be had for a couple hundred bucks. In many cases, Windows costs more than the machine it runs on. That's not right! Without that hardware, Windows would be nothing! But the reverse is not true - you could buy a computer without Windows and enjoy it quite well using a free operating system.
Windows should be cheap... no more than a blockbuster video game - let's say $50-60 retail, $20 OEM. Seriously! If I could sell Windows to my customers for $20 with their new computers, I can tell you I'd sell a whole more of it! The way things are today, I'd guess at least 2/3rds of those who buy computers from me are loading an unlicensed copy of Windows on there - actually a bunch of them probably dual-boot XP and Vista.
The artificially high price directly encourages software piracy. Meanwhile these despicable "retail pirates", these dickless sons of bitches who sell burned copies on the street, are profiting because of that price gap. Eliminate the price gap, and it will eliminate the piracy problem. It won't stop private copying, nothing ever will, but it will squeeze the commercial pirates out of business.
Just because employers make irrational demands, does not mean you're forced to oblige them. If a company gives you flak for submitting a CV in non-MS format, my spidey-sense tells me you wouldn't enjoy working there anyway. Plain text works, PDF is relatively safe too.
Me, I have zero tolerance for obnoxiously stupid individuals. Obviously I'm alone, because there are a lot of good people wasting away making very stupid bosses very rich. Thank god for that employee assistance hotline, eh ? What good is a job if it destroys your will to live ?
Because it's been 13 years since Microsoft developed anything of moderate value.
Windows XP is just 95 with a retooled engine, but to most people's eyeballs it's the same damned thing with more gradients on the UI chrome.
Vista adds ZERO value, it removes value by crippling the system with far-reaching DRM and disappointing performance. Even its revamped security model is full of holes and users are just as likely to get confused (or annoyed).
If Vista offered anything the users really wanted, we would have stood in line at 12:01 A.M. to buy it. Remember MS-Dos 6.0 ? People stood in line for that one, we all wanted to get our hands on Memmaker, Doublespace and a handful of refinements that actually made our computers work better and play harder. It was worth the money.
Remember Windows 95 ? People stood in line for that one too. It was a leap forward from Windows 3.11 (which stank). W95 was a mess, buggy and temperamental, but it was fresh and offered new opportunities for multitasking and, at long last, long file names. It, too, was worth the money.
Windows XP ? It was just a cheap consumer version of Windows 2000, minus the stability. Not until SP1 was it any usable for more than a day or two, but today it's pretty solid, after SEVEN YEARS of patches. Not really worth the money.
The main reason people upgraded from 95/98/ME to XP was for hardware support. The OS itself didn't offer much in the way of new features, which is why a lot of older computers still run Windows ME or 2000, because that's what they came with and there's no real value in upgrading.
Now with Vista, there's even less of an incentive to upgrade because the new OS has worse hardware support for _current_ equipment than the old OS it supposedly replaced. Vista (32-bit) still doesn't support more than 4gb of Ram, and 64-bit support is spotty. Why the hell anyone would want to run Vista on a non-64-bit-capable machine is beyond me, but stupid makes this world go round.
If I were dying to have blingy blurry jiggly UI chrome, I'd keep XP and load something like WindowBlinds, or whatever the gimmick-du-jour is. Cheaper, more reliable (go figure!) and I'll still be able to do the same things I do today.
Head, 'sploded!
the majority (yes, not all) of the terrorists in the past 20 years have been middle eastern looking males
Maybe that's because there's a whole lot more middle-eastern looking people than pasty white people in the world. Some of them cram over 150 million people in countries smaller than the average U.S. state.
If the terrorists were Chinese-looking instead, would you say that all Chinese, Japanese, Vietnamese and Koreans are terrorists ? Because the average American can't tell them apart. Would you harass all of them if they tried to board a plane ?
Wiping out the U.S. Congress would just mean all their wealthy families would band up and kill the world. It would be Iraq times 100.
Sure, it would change the world, but not for the better.
You worded that as a question ? That just shows me you need to stop drinking the kool aid.
Simple terrorism test:
1. Why did the U.S. military invade Iraq ?
A: Revenge, and to spread "democracy". (political and ideological)
2. What did the U.S. military do in Iraq ?
A: Kill a shitload of people in the name of God. (ideological)
3. Is the U.S. military (as a group) completely insane, acting upon primal anti-social urges ?
A: No. They calculated and planned this.
When you kill that many people, and you're not a demented serial killer, then only two options remain: terrorist, or god. I'm pretty sure the U.S. military aren't gods, though some gun freaks may disagree.
Modern copy protection doesn't prevent the physical copy, it prevents the enjoyment of that copy. You can still make ISOs and throw them around, but they're unusable unless a cracked executable is available to bypass Securom / Safedisc etc.
We're not in the 80s anymore, you can't protect software by warping disk sectors. They tried doing that a few years back with Safedisc, by using specific chains of edge-case hard-to-encode bits on CD, which would read just fine, but confuse the hell out of cheap burners that would either correct the shady bits, or die trying. A year later, most new burners had a revised EFM encoder that fixed the bug, effectively thwarting the copy protection.
Today's copy protection is more like DRM, because you can't protect raw bits flying over the interweb.
Well yes, but there's also an important reason for the -1 mod: the GP has no factual basis for laying the blame on Israel.
In fact, I've seen far more attacks coming from Pakistan, Egypt and Yemen (?!) than Israel. But yes, people are racially biased... whether it's pro-racism or anti-racism, very few people have the discipline to be right down the middle.
I think what a lot of people neglect to do is to filter access by country. If you're operating a U.S. bank, why in the world would you want Vietnamese and Chinese IPs visiting your site or hammering your firewall ? Do you have an admin over there, SSHing in ? No ? Then block it!
It's usually quite simple to come up with a geographically aware security strategy. Figure out which areas need access to each resource, and shut out the rest. Web access isn't spared, either. If you don't offer services outside your country, I strongly suggest serving up a different, nerfed site to those people - something with no sign-up forms or dynamic content of any kind. That way, they can still read up about who you are and what you do (again, goddamned travelers surfing abroad), but since you don't do business with that nation, you don't expose your site's soft underbelly to people who have no business being there in the first place. There's always the phone or postal mail for those folks.
Clearly you're not on the ReiserFS mailing list.
Vicious, he is. I'm not saying he did it, but if he did, he strikes me as the kind of ass who'd think he's smarter than everyone in the courtroom. The sad thing is in this day and age, he's probably right.
Yep, definitely a terrorist. The whole mass murderer angle is kinda sexy, but there's no way I could actually eliminate large groups of people and blame it on demonic voices inside my head. The only demonic voice to be heard is the one escaping my lips.
Perhaps the difference between me and the common terrorist, is I fully realize the fact that killing a few thousand people won't change a damned thing. How many tens of millions have died in Africa, or South America ? They're in no better shape than they were a century ago.
How many deaths can change the world ? A billion, perhaps ? I don't know of any terrorist organization that could command that sort of power without rotting from the inside out. Not even the U.S. Gov't, with their legions of suicidal troops, can trigger change on this dying planet.
Tens of thousands ?
Ever heard of an ISO image ? BitTorrent ? FTP ? DirectConnect ? What about that guy in Singapore who mails out copies for a small fee ?
If a cracker wants a game, he doesn't get it from Walmart or Best Buy, he gets it from the internets.
Grave and cheese on french fries.. sweet jesus.
:) Ready to party again!
Is there anyone left on this planet that does not know what Poutine is ? It's bad enough that 99.44% of everyone who isn't hardcore Quebec blood has to screw up the idiot-proof recipe.
In fact, I just had a bad poutine last night. The fries were fine, they used St-Albert cheese curds, which is perfect, but then they went and poured this ghetto freakin' chicken gravy. TABARNAK!
For those of you who aren't afraid to die young, try this: either cut your fries fresh, and cut them thick, or buy frozen fries... either Cavendish or the cheapest store brand you can find. Pile on a very generous quantity of white cheddar cheese curds, none of that shredded bullshit, and NO GODDAMNED MOZZA! Top it off with thick dark gravy for the authentic flavour, or BBQ gravy if you're curious.
It will kill you, but it might just be the best snack you'll ever know. Nothing mops up a hangover like two pounds of poutine with your bacon and eggs
In an age where basic human rights are subject to state legislation, government is anything but balanced.
That's because MOO was Civilization in Space.
MOO2 & MOM were made by the same people and used the same engine.
I have hemorrhoids, you insensitive clod!
Fantastic! Thank you, sir!
They were terrorists the minute they started spreading terror.
When they boarded the plane, chances are they were just another passenger with a passport, like all the others.
The only thing ID verification does is show that you have a piece of paper with a picture on it. It could very well be someone else's piece of paper, with your picture schmoozed in. It could also be a complete fabrication, fresh off the dye-sub. It doesn't say "Terrorist!" or "Not a terrorist!", it says "This is a picture of Joe Random. If the person in front of you looks like this picture, you should refer to them as Joe Random."
It's not like Cletus the Rent-a-Cop is going to scrutinize every little detail, call three different unrelated people to check references, and actually care. Let's face it: if crazies weren't getting on planes in the first place, Cletus would be out of a job.
If I were to march into a crowded lobby tomorrow morning and spontaneously open fire on random civilians, I'd be a terrorist. Today, I have no criminal record whatsoever. Tomorrow I could be Canada's most wanted. Looking at my ID won't save anyone's life. If looking at someone's ID tells you they should be arrested, that person should have been behind bars in the first place.
Yup, I have to install cracks on my games, mostly because some genius over at Securom decided SCSI was the devil's tool. See, because I'm smart enough to realize that 15k rpm SCSI drives are faster (and cheaper!) than Raptors, I get labeled a digital terrorist and punished by this stupid copy protection bullshit. FYI, they ban SCSI because Daemon Tools emulates SCSI devices... so in response, Daemon Tools came up with IDE emulators.
The only games that don't get cracked, are the ones that nobody cares about. Even Daikatana was cracked... Copy protection is no longer a cat and mouse game, because the cat has ten thousand claws and a million eyes - you just can't escape it.
The pathetic thing about it all, is that software developers pay big bucks for this protection software that doesn't even work. Oh, I mean sure it works, for the first four hours until someone releases a crack. In most cases there's a patch available before the game is even officially released, thanks to inside leaks and pre-stocked retail outlets.
I'd much rather see the developers save their money, get rid of the copy protection and let their products thrive on their own merits. Not everyone copies games, and those that do, will not buy games. If one game is deemed "uncrackable", the warez kiddie will simply find some other game to play. You didn't make a penny more.
You mean, like a Playstation 3 ? :P
Fine then, if an artist wants to release just the album, let Apple collect higher fees to compensate for the hassle and reduced sales... and enforce a lower price point.
If the full album were $7.99, it wouldn't be so bad. Eight bucks won't kill you, if it's a band you actually like.
Pop acts can kiss my ass.
Yeah well, considering the huge number of Chinese people living in Canada, whoever's launching these attacks should back the fuck off. I can't think of very many countries that are as welcoming to Chinese immigrants as Canada, because a significant portion of the world is (justifiably) pissed off / scared of them.
:)
Me, I like Chinese food a lot
But seriously, back the fuck off. I've already banned Chinese IP blocks from every single box I own, nothing but trouble. They should work on cleaning up their act - this world doesn't need another war.
What puzzles me, or should I say "baffles", is how revealing the location of the body somehow makes this man less of a psycho.
Finding the body does not automagically make Hans less of a threat. Why would his sentence be reduced ? He should be grateful the victim's family doesn't have him drawn and quartered.
I'm not fond of laws - they never work out as intended, thanks to these pedantic illiterate asshats we call prosecutors - but if anything can help tip the scales toward the little guy, I'm all for it.
You nailed it. Anyone can be considered "scientifically relevant" if they're willing to bribe the academic clearing houses. The aristocracy of science is the complete antithesis to its actual purpose.
Science, even bullshit science, is big money.